Russka (31 page)

Indeed, the splendid beasts were half as big again as the sturdy little northern horses the villagers used.

Milei himself ate quickly, made a few testy comments about the turnips they offered him, and then at once retired for the night. But when the steward’s wife complained to her husband about the lord’s bad temper that night, the steward grinned. ‘It’s a good sign. I know him,’ he told her. And when she looked surprised: ‘See, he wouldn’t bother to get cross if he hadn’t decided to take an interest in the place.’

The old fellow was right.

Milei was up at dawn the next morning, riding out to inspect the estate, with a few curt nods to the inhabitants as they went out to the fields.

The largest crop, the spring-sown rye, had already been reaped in July. They were reaping barley that day.

Milei rode round every inch of the place, with the steward running along beside him. He paid special attention to the
chernozem
.

‘We don’t grow any wheat?’

‘Not at present, lord.’

‘We should try.’ He gave a short, hard laugh. ‘Then you can make Communion bread.’

Communion bread? So the boyar meant them to have a church. The steward smiled to himself. He must really mean business.

He made other suggestions, too. They had started to grow buckwheat in the south when he was a boy. He wanted to try that at Russka. In particular, he seemed to have taken offence at those turnips they had offered him the previous night.

‘Damned peasants’ food,’ he said in disgust. ‘You hardly grow any peas here.’

‘No, lord.’

‘I want more peas, and lentils too. Hemp as well. Grow it with the peas. Hemp seeds are full of oil. They keep you warm in winter.’

‘Yes, lord.’ What on earth could the boyar want with all this? Could it be that he not only wanted to build the place up but actually live here himself? ‘Will this be for yourself, lord?’ he rashly inquired.

‘Mind your own business and do as you’re told,’ the boyar replied sharply, and the steward immediately bowed.

So that’s what he’s up to, if I know him, he thought happily.

Milei was pleased with the flax.

‘But I want more,’ he announced.

This was the basic fibre product of northern Russian agriculture and it was one commodity that could be profitably transported to market. The north-western city of Pskov was even exporting flax abroad.

When he inspected the livestock, the boyar did not complain. The sheep were not bad: they were small, hornless animals with rather long bodies that he had introduced himself. The pigs did well. But the cattle made him shake his head sadly. They stood less than three and a half feet high at the shoulder; at winter’s end, a single man could carry them out of their stalls to pasture.

Milei said nothing, and passed on.

It was afternoon before the boyar finally returned.

He ate, then slept. And then, in the early evening, he made a tour of the village huts and inspected the peasants.

He was not pleased.

‘A dirty, miserable collection of people,’ he remarked with irritation to the steward. ‘And don’t bother to remind me I sent most of them here,’ he added with a grim smile.

But his temper visibly improved when, last of all, he came to the house of the father and daughter he had sent the previous year.

‘At last,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘A clean izba’

It was better than that. There were fresh herbs hanging from a little straw rope over the stove. The place smelled sweet. Everything was beautifully cared for: the loving cup on the table, in the shape of a duck, was a little work of art. In the red corner, a candle burned before the icon; in the corner opposite, three beautiful embroidered cloths hung.

This was what Yanka, in eight months of the blackest inner torment, had achieved.

And in front of him, it appeared to the boyar, stood a model father and his child. Though he had been working in the field all day, the peasant’s thin brown beard was neatly combed. He had put a fresh blouse on in the boyar’s honour; and he smiled respectfully, but manfully, like a fellow with a clear conscience.

The girl was a pearl. Neat, clean, and he was bound to say, good-looking. For once, even the cynical Milei’s heart was touched.

‘A good man deserves such a daughter to look after him,’ he said with a pleasant smile for them both.

How the girl had improved since he had last seen her. She was still slim, but her body and face had filled out a little in this first season of her womanhood. Her skin was wonderfully clear, yet a little pale.

He looked at her carefully. Was there a trace of worry in her eyes?

Then, thinking of his own daughters, he reminded himself that all girls worry about something at that age.

‘A pretty virgin to pluck,’ he could not help murmuring to himself once they were outside again.

He went to Dirty Place the next day, then announced that he was departing but would return shortly.

‘So be ready for me every day,’ he shouted to the steward as he left.

He did not come back for a month.

When he returned, in late September, he was followed by four boats which his men were pulling up the stream with ropes.

In the first was a family of slaves.

‘Mordvinians, I’m afraid,’ he said to the steward, ‘but you’ll make them work.’

In the others there was livestock: Milei had brought young calves from the Riazan region.

‘They grow them bigger in those Oka meadows,’ he said. ‘Give two of them to that new man with the daughter to look after for the winter. He’ll take good care of them.’

He settled into his house and announced that he would remain there a week, at the end of which he would receive the rents.

‘Then,’ he told the steward, ‘I’m going to Novgorod on business. I shall return from there in the spring.’

He made no inspections this time, but contented himself with walking around and watching the villagers at work.

One of the activities he liked to watch was the threshing.

This took place on a space cleared beside the little kilns where the grain was dried by smoking.

The sheaves were threshed in two ways. Some were hit with sticks and flails: this was the men’s work. But the more delicate method, performed by the women, used a horizontal log, on two upright supports. By tapping the sheaf on the log, the grain was knocked out but the long straw was preserved for weaving and plaiting. The rye straw was especially long and soft, yet strong enough for rope making.

Milei often walked past and paused to watch. Though the women were at first a little frightened by the presence of this big, Turkish-looking lord with his hard eyes and yellow hair, they soon got used to him. He did not seem to be looking at anything in particular.

But Yanka soon sensed that he was. She could feel it.

She was always neatly dressed; but the second day he came by, he noticed that the smock she was wearing had one of her bird designs embroidered on the front, and that she had tied her belt just a fraction tighter than usual, so that as she bent and then raised her arm, he could clearly see the outline of her body.

Indeed, to Milei, worldly though he was, there was something magical in this little village scene, miles from anywhere, with this pretty, clean young creature working with the other women before him.

He had been away from home for a long time. He felt strong, but he knew he was getting older; and this girl was different.

He felt strangely refreshed, as though in this magical late summer season, in this place apart, it had been granted him for a few days to step outside the passing of the years.

He did not speak to her, nor she to him. But they were both aware of each other and of this thought which, as inevitable as the coming of the shadows, seemed to join them in the bright silence of the afternoon.

On the fourth day, in the early evening, as he was standing alone gazing out over the reddening field across the river, she came towards him, smiled, and passed on.

The day before he was due to leave, Milei the boyar received his rents.

They brought him sacks of grain and young pigs. Half the pigs were usually slaughtered before winter. They brought him lambs and baby goats. One family, who had elected to pay in money instead of kind, brought him a pile of the rabbit skins bearing an official stamp, that were the small currency of that time and place.

They brought him beaver skins that he could trade.

It was a haunting little scene, with peasants dragging forward pigs and cattle. The cattle still wore the wooden bells that were hung round their necks when they were put out to feed in the woods after harvest. A melancholy clinking filled the autumn air as they came before the lord and were marked for killing.

Milei, though he was pleased with the rents, felt a sadness at the thought that he was about to leave this place. At the end of the proceedings, when it was almost dusk, he rose and, signalling to the steward that he wished to be alone, left the hamlet for a last walk along the river’s edge.

The shadows were long; the trees seemed very tall in the silence.

He was surprised a little later, though not displeased, to find the girl in front of him on the path. Below them lay the still, glassy river. He saw that she wished to speak, and stopped.

This time, she looked straight at him with those strange, half-sad eyes.

‘Take me with you, lord.’

He gazed at her.

‘Where to?’

‘To Novgorod. Isn’t that where you are going?’

He nodded.

‘You don’t like it here?’ he asked quietly.

‘I must leave.’

He looked at her curiously. What was troubling her?

‘Is your father unkind?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. What’s that to you?’ She took a deep breath. ‘Take me with you.’

‘You want to see Novgorod: is that it?’

‘I want to go with you.’

There was something desperate about her. He had not observed it before, and if he had been a young man, he might have found it a little frightening. She was like a
rusalka
, haunting him from a river. Yet all the same, she seemed quite self-possessed.

He thought of her body.

‘What would your father say?’

She shrugged.

So that was it. He thought he guessed. He looked at her calmly, with a new frankness.

‘And what would you do for me, if I took you with me?’

She stared back at him, with equal calmness.

‘Whatever you want.’

It was her only chance. He did not know that, if he refused, she had decided to kill herself.

‘Very well,’ he said.

He turned to go back. The river below was a pale ribbon of light; the woods were already dark.

It was a long journey – nearly four hundred miles north-west to the lands by the Baltic Sea. Yet as soon as she left Russka with the boyar and his retinue of half a dozen men, she felt a sense of excitement.

It was also, for a time, uncomfortable. For the boyar had sent the boats downriver again and told her they were to ride to Novgorod.

‘You can ride, can’t you?’

She could ride the farm horses, of course, but it would not occur to a peasant to undertake a long journey except by boat. By the end of the first day in the saddle she was sore. By the third, she was in agony. Milei thought this amusing.

‘Anyone would think I’d beaten and raped you,’ he remarked jocularly.

He was a large and powerful figure; and when he rode his tall and splendid horses, he looked larger and more impressive still. He wore a fur-trimmed coat and hat, which had a diamond in it. His big, high-cheeked face, his hard eyes set wide apart, his rich fair beard, all seemed to proclaim: ‘I am power itself, untouchable by mere peasants, for whom I care nothing.’

And with a trace of pride she watched him as they rode and murmured to herself: ‘This is my boyar.’

He had wasted no time. He had made love to her the first night after they had left the village.

But though, for a moment, she had been a little alarmed by the size of this powerful man whose tent she was sharing, he was surprisingly gentle with her.

He made love skilfully. She hoped she pleased him.

He was kindly as well. A few questions had before long drawn from her the whole story of her recent months with her father, and the boyar was comforting.

‘Of course you want to get away,’ he told her gently. ‘But don’t think too badly of him, or of yourself. In these small villages, miles from anywhere, I can promise you these things are not uncommon.’

Her father, to her surprise, had not raised great objections to her leaving. Strictly, since they were free peasants, Milei could not order her father to give her up. But when the powerful boyar had summoned the peasant to him and informed him of his decision, he gave him such a piercing look that her father went scarlet.

He did not altogether lose his presence of mind though.

‘The girl is of great help to me, lord,’ he said carefully. ‘I shall be a poorer man without her.’

Milei had understood.

‘How much poorer?’

‘My land is very bad. And you see I am a good workman. Let me have some of the
chernozem
.’

Milei considered. He supposed the fellow would work it well.

‘Very well. Five
chets
. You’ll pay a fair rent. Talk to the steward.’

And he had waved him away.

When Yanka had parted from him, there had been tears in his eyes. She saw him for what he was, and felt sorry for him.

They rode up to the Kliasma River.

Yanka would have liked to enter the capital city of Vladimir,
which was not far away, and see the famous icon of Our Lady. She had heard that it had been painted by the Evangelist St Luke himself. But Milei shook his head, and the little party turned westwards. They rode along the Kliasma for ten days until they were just north of the small town of Moscow. Then they struck north-west.

The rains caught them just as they reached another minor city, Tver, that lay below the gentle Valdai Hills, on the banks of the upper reaches of the Volga. It was a small town, rather like its neighbour Moscow. They found an inn there and waited for ten days. Then the snows came.